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Steve Moore, B.A., J.D. Author
Steve has been in the music business for over 30 years! He's worked as a professional musician, producer, and has been involved in almost every aspect of the music business. He's also the author of "The Truth about the Music Business"

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With all of the new ways to get your message across – which platform should you consider? And how does one find the time?

I’ve been blogging intermittently on this “other blogger” site for quite some time now – I’d have to go back and actually look to see when I wrote my first blog for this particular FEED and/or FEEDS. But I’m sure it’s been quite a while. In the past, I had maintained my four My Space Pages: Steve Moore & the New South (my band a.k.a. “The Cowboy Killers”); High Cotton Records (my label), The Truth about the Music Biz (my book); and Music Square One (MSO – the parent company to ALL of my MUSIC endeavors where I would post music, blog about the music business, etc. And I still sort of check up on My Space every so often and that used to take up a good deal of my time – answering friend requests, checking/approving comments, etc But when I started to see that many of my friends were dropping off My Space as my friend count dropped from 6 figures to much less than that – then I noted that there was a paradigm shift. Everything was indeed changing.

Since my interests are NOT by any means restricted to music, songwriting, producing, audio/video work or for that matter the MUSIC BUSINESS – I’ve constantly opened and closed numerous accounts to allow me many platforms to share my ideas, thoughts, and yes, even some of my writings (published or otherwise) that include prose, poetry, and even some short stories – yet, when I had finished my book, “The Truth about the Music Business” – I sort have had said quite a bit in those 656 some pages or so – so I backed off on the concentrated writings and moved to some shorter forms. Hence, I had set up a twitter account (and now have several), but find that 140 Characters can be restrictive and yet liberating at the same time – but no matter how succinct or obscure a “Tweet” may be it usually falls short of getting an entire idea or set of ideas across even with a “bitly” that links to a larger writing, blog post, etc. In fact, I’ve probably had too many social network accounts over the past 10 or more years – more than I can to think about – most of which have either been closed or made entirely private (for reasons I’d just as soon not mention – but “privacy” should be enough).

With that said, I had built a LOT of basic sites in PURE HTML a long time ago for MSO, High Cotton and band sites, etc but was never really that pleased with them due even if they were “graphically pleasing” but mainly due to their lack of functionality – as other things were more important and just ate up my time as that always seems to be the case – there just aren’t enough hours in the day, weeks, or month as they seemingly fly by these days and there’s not much time off doing what I do – as I’m far from a nine to fiver (Or as Rich Cobb calls me “A Tireless Second Miler”). And I have never really have been one of those who just sticks to a basic schedule, goes to their “day job” and then does little else but take care of the yard, house and other domestic duties (you work hard to pay people to do that for you) and since I worked as a professional musician paying my way though high school, then college, then law school – I didn’t really seem to have much FREE time between band rehearsals, moving equipment and constant gigging. Then when I was in Nashville a huge part of my day was going out at night – as you don’t get clients without being there – where it’s happening. In fact, “you have to pay to play and be present to win” as Ralph Murphy (VP at ASCAP) always said – as he stayed at my house for almost three years or so – until I went through my “major distraction phase” as I sometimes call it.

Be that as it may, I built a beta test site for Music Square One in pure HTML and hand coded all of it but didn’t use PHP on purpose to see how XHTML would work and also was testing various code plug-ins for widgets and the like – the site worked very well – but it wasn’t what I needed – as even though quite aesthetically pleasing I didn’t find that it had nearly the functional qualities as I would have liked it to be. And to me “form follows function” and in that regard – it was a success. However, I needed to step up to better software with CS-4 to allow me to add more back end functionality and to use xhtml, div-tables but still needed MORE back end functionality so I ditched pure CSS and CS-4 and moved into PHP. Which I’m not totally hooked on – it’s an incredible language that allows for many arguments (not oral back and forth) as well as tables and Databases for SQL, etc. So I created the NEW “MSO” site and have NOW switched all of my new sites into that platform: Linux! It had been at least 11 or more years since I even donned the “RED HAT” and set up my own server – which by the way has NEVER ONCE crashed – but I’d have to go back and totally read up on what I had done….but with Linux I found that not only could I cross platforms (MAC or PC) but design for ALL Browsers (although I must say that sometimes my FEEDS in Chrome end up in Code only – go figure – as Google owns almost all RSS feed platforms that I use) – but I digress…

So now that I have integrated my sites so that with ONE push of a button I can update EVERYTHING in regards to social networks I have out there, from twitter, to FB personal, to FB FAN PAGES (that I was working on with Static FBML- but it’s now STATIC HTML – CSS Styles), and still link back to My Space and MORE. In short, as I post this BLOG on my new MSO site – as a POST – I’m done – out it goes to any place I like including from my Newsletter (if you’ve subscribed along with a pretty simple “Captcha” code and verification and everywhere else that I don’t mind sharing) but I am careful NOT to allow FB or other “personal sites” in turn feed back out to my websites, blogs, etc.

And IF I post a new YouTube video – that video can be interconnected to almost all of my social networks as well – and IF I use “Smart YouTube” to post my video on my site – then out it goes yet again with ONE CLICK to all my social networks One just must be careful as to how many auto-shares one has in order that you don’t double post or end up posting what’s intended to be private (or at least shared with JUST my INNER CIRCLE of readers, friends, etc) such that any particular post ends up where those that I do NOT want to be privy to that information don’t get to read it.

So to answer my own question – to BLOG or to “Blog-Post” – I much prefer to latter – and with that in mind, I’m probably going to set this BLOGGER account aside for a while as I work on my BLOG-POST.

But I will most likely copy/paste my most popular blogs from this format – onto either High Cotton’s new site, The Truth about the Music Business and/or Steve Moore & the New South or just directly to Music Square One – www.musicsquareone.com – hence I won’t have to do nearly the work to get that message out and can use my PHP code tracking apps that I wrote myself – to bypass those that think I don’t know they are viewing my social nets or that I’m just using Java Script to track my page views, check out IP addresses, and just about ANYTHING I need to know about who visits, when, how long they stay and what they look at – as well as their TEMP CACHE so that I can see WHAT ELSE they’ve been looking at as well – pretty Scary – but that IS the Beauty of PHP and Linux! My PHP hosted images can keep me informed…and hence to me a blog-post RULES!

Singing out for now and perhaps for quite a while as I’ve got MORE coding to do – and then it’s back to the Code that I’m most used to – USC, CFR, et seq – But I wasn’t just have to FIND the time – I’ll have to MAKE the time! It’s like I’ve said time and time again, you’ll never get published – unless you WORK at it – and you have to FINISH – as I was reminded by one of my new writers – where I turned that into a sort of joke. ‘Two aspiring authors are in a book store – one says to the other – The only difference between these writers and us – THEY FINISHED! (and of course, then you have to get a pub deal – but I was lucky enough to sign a deal and get paid up front – so I was for sure going to get published – but in today’s world – you don’t need a publisher – you just need to finish – there’s plenty of start-ups that will help you get self published – one of my companies are included I’m just a little ahead of the game as I’ve had a few years of publishing behind me!)